Google App Engine Blog

News, notes, tips and tricks from the Google App Engine Team

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Today’s guest post comes from Ryan Campbell and Stephen Connolly, developers at CloudBees. CloudBees is a major supporter of Jenkins, the popular open source continuous integration server, and the creator of DEV@Cloud, a hosted version of Jenkins.

As development teams grow, it becomes increasingly hard to ensure that their work is in sync. Jenkins is one of the leading tools to combat this issue. Jenkins provides a process where work across your team is automated, so that building, testing and deployment are all centralized in one location. As a major supporter of Jenkins, CloudBees has helped companies streamline their build, test and deployment processes both on premise, and in the cloud via CloudBees DEV@Cloud.

Google App Engine users can now run Jenkins continuous integration in the cloud by signing up at appengine.cloudbees.com. Jenkins will monitor your projects’ source code for any changes, run the necessary builds and tests, and notify your team of any problems - or automatically deploy the application to Google App Engine if everything looks good. This process helps to prevent the deployment of broken code, and gives everyone a central record of what changes went into each deployment. If you’re new to continuous integration and Jenkins, the Jenkins wiki is a great place to get started.

The video below shows you how to setup a Jenkins Maven job that checks out the source code, builds the application, runs any tests, and then deploys to Google App Engine. Note that you can use virtually any source code service you like, including GitHub or CloudBees’ own Git and SVN servers.

Once you have a basic build working, you can integrate additional online services into your Jenkins workflow, like Sauce Labs for browser-based tests, Sonar for code analysis, or JFrog Artifactory as an artifact repository manager. These and several other CloudBees services can be automatically subscribed to using the Services link in your toolbar.

In summary, CloudBees Jenkins for Google App Engine is unique in several ways:

It's fully managed, which means you don't have to set up Jenkins or the build machines you need.

You always have enough build capacity -- we dynamically add more build machines as you need them.

CloudBees Jenkins is free to get started.

Sign up for CloudBees DEV@Cloud at appengine.cloudbees.com to have Jenkins monitor the health of your projects, and automatically deploy your applications to Google App Engine. You only need your Google App Engine account, no credit cards or command lines are required. Now, you can focus on delivering features, and rely on CloudBees to manage the development infrastructure.